1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of digital media. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for distributing binary presentations within digital media content files.
2. Background Information
With advances in integrated circuit, microprocessor, networking and communication technologies, an increasing number of devices, in particular, digital computing devices, are being networked together to facilitate the exchange of information. Accordingly, traditional audio and video content providers such as radio and television studios, recording associations, independent recording artists, and so forth, are turning to digital communication networks such as the Internet for dissemination and distribution of multimedia content.
Typically such multimedia content is provided in the form of a file that can be downloaded and subsequently rendered through a “viewer” or “player”, or the multimedia content is streamed where the media begins to be rendered by a viewer/player before the entire media clip is fully retrieved. Due to the nature of digital media, however, multimedia content files are typically quite large (e.g. in the Megabytes of data size), often necessitating that consumers or receivers of the distributed multimedia utilize high-bandwidth network/Internet connections when attempting to consume or retrieve the media in order to mitigate any perceived quality degradation as well as decrease download/access times.
A variety of audio and/or video (hereinafter “audio/video”) compression standards or frameworks (such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MP3 & MPEG-4 from the Motion Picture Expert's Group, RealMedia and RealAudio from RealNetworks Corporation, Windows Media Audio format from Microsoft Corporation, and so forth) have been introduced to, among other things, reduce multimedia file sizes in an architected manner. For example, the MP3 compression scheme utilizes perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove redundant and irrelevant parts of a digital sound signal resulting e.g. in nearly a twelve-fold decrease in audio file size.
Although through the continued introduction of new standards and compression schemes the sizes of individual multimedia files are continually being reduced, distribution of presentations including multiple such multimedia files as well as the integration of non-audio/video data into multimedia files remains problematic. For example, current distribution methods for distributing one or more web pages containing a variety of audio and video (still and/or motion) content to another party, require the each source audio clip, video clip, image, URL, flash presentation, and so forth referenced by the web page(s) needs to be provided separately to the recipient. Moreover, the original file and directory structures utilized by the web page(s) also need to be maintained during the transfer/distribution. Depending upon the number of audio/visual components displayed on a given web page let alone the audio/visual components displayed on the web pages further referenced by the initial page, distribution may prove difficult and time consuming.